Not with Olson's media...The media flows through the primer flash holes like sand through a hour glass....

Hi

Lol - I love this place. I'm thinking about handloading again (that wild North-American 30-Lb. cardstock is hard to hit!), and had just begun wondering about brass tumbling. I used to reload .45-70 and .45 ACP, but as little as I shot, I just hand-cleaned it all. Now that I'm thinking about 100 rounds at a time, hand cleaning is just too time consuming.

I used the Lyman tufnut media and it worked excellent but then after reading this forum I purchased a bad of crushed walnut from petsmart. I also purchased some jewelers rouge from harbor freight, I then bought a cheap coffee grinder at wal-mart. I now break a small chunk of the jewelers rouge off and put it in the coffee grinder with a small amount of the crushed walnut. It pretty much turns the rouge into powder and then I dump it into the tumbler with more crushed walnut. After it tumbles a while it looks exactly like, and performs exactly like the lyman tufnut at a fraction of the cost. Just be careful not to use too much rouge. A little bit goes a long way. I also tried the corn cob bedding from pet smart. It is a bit cheaper than the walnut, however most of my cases are .257 or smaller and the media gets stuck inside the case and becomes hard to remove, and might I add very hard to remove from 223 cases. I did tumble a few 30-06 cases with the corn cob media and it seems that there is no problem with 30 caliber and up but had to dig it out of my 257 weatherby cases. Guess I have 40 pounds of corn cob media for my 357 herret and 454 casull cases. I guess I better start shooting more if I am going to use all that media.

I've been using a Lyman 1200 for 10 years or so now (don't think it was called the 1200 back then).
I tumble all my fired brass, usually after I run it thru a universal decapping die.
I use walnut shells or corncob media- whatever I pick up on sale. Seems to me both work. I want clean brass running thru my dies- I don't worry too much about whether the brass is shiny.
Can tell you one thing for sure: fresh media works lots faster than media that's been used a lot. I find that changing media regularly cuts tumbling time significantly.

Yup...It was called a Lyman Turbo 1200 about 15 years ago when I got mine...Absolutely no problems. I just took mine apart and cleaned it for the first time a month ago...